Do you believe in Free Will?

[betajaen]

My cat is a non-sentient being, incapable of understanding what free-will is, let alone give an informed opinion.

Duh. that comment was about your avatar.

Besides, I agree with you. Religion and science are incompatible and leads to unnecessary flame wars

I have it up for the recent event that happened in the UK yesterday.

[kneeride]

Hi guys, some of you have said that the universe is non-deterministic. Has that been proven? Sorry, I'm just curious because I assumed the problem was too complex to solve. Some people have mentioned deterministic chaos, but that is still deterministic right? It's just that it seems unpredictible because it is too complex/precise for us to measure or simulate.

Take it further, and consider the typical stand alone computer running a program. Is it deterministic? Not always, because it exists in the real world, and every now and then a bit will get flipped just because a cosmic ray hit the RAM.

This does not prove the universe is non-determinitic unless you can prove the cosmic ray is non-deterministic.

[CABAListic]

Hi guys, some of you have said that the universe is non-deterministic. Has that been proven? Sorry, I'm just curious because I assumed the problem was too complex to solve. Some people have mentioned deterministic chaos, but that is still deterministic right? It's just that it seems unpredictible because it is too complex/precise for us to measure or simulate.

"Proven" isn't the right word, but as far as our current knowledge (quantum mechanics) goes, it is (in my opinion) the most reasonable assumption. But this is similar to free will in that you will probably never be able to prove it either way, because you would need an outside view to actually decide the question.
You are right about deterministic chaos, but that arises in classical mechanics. Quantum mechanics goes further

[mkultra333]

If you had infinite measuring ability and could work stuff out infinitely fast, you could maybe get around the classical chaos. Classical chaos arises because of your imprecise measurements. But even with infinite knowledge of the state of the quantum system, it'd still be just as random as ever.

As an example, say you fire individual photons of a very precise polarization at a polarized filter, one after the other. When the two polarizations are the same, 100% of the photons get through. Rotate the filter 90 degrees, and none of them get through. Rotate it 45 degrees, and each individual photon has a 50% chance of getting through. But it's totally random as to whether each one gets through or not. Even if you have complete information about the photon and the filter to infinite precision you are still stuck with what is essentially a flip of a coin.

(Apologies if I got the percentages for the angles wrong, just going off the top of my head.)

Regarding whether QM has been proven to be random, no it hasn't. But it is inherent to the standard QM setup that many of the measurable outcomes are not stated exactly, but given as probabilities, regardless of how much information about the system that you have. Generally, it is accepted as completely and genuinely random. However you can cobble on ad-hoc and unprovable assumptions that it is deterministic if you like (Hidden Variables Theory).

The important thing to remember about those added assumptions though is that
a) there's no proof to support them, and in principle it's impossible to find such proof.
b) they add nothing to your ability to predict the system.
c) they violate "locality" (they are required to communicate information faster than light)

Going back to the original "The universe is deterministic, therefore humans have no freewill" argument. Even if you got really hard nosed and refused to accept that QM is random, you still can't prove it is deterministic either. So the argument still fails for lack of proof for the argument's main premise.

[mkultra333]

Found an interesting article on wikipedia that adds something interesting to the debate. It's something called "Stochastic Resonance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_resonance

Basically, in many signal processing systems, adding just the right amount of random noise actually increases the effectiveness of the system. The right amount of noise causes signals that might fall below the detection threshold to get a small boost.

Relating this to the human determinism case, it seems stochastic resonance occurs in many neurological systems.

Stochastic resonance has been observed in the neural tissue of the sensory systems of several organisms.[3] Computationally, neurons exhibit SR because of non-linearities in their processing. SR has yet to be fully explained in biological systems, but neural synchrony in the brain (specifically in the Gamma wave frequency[4]) has been suggested as a possible neural mechanism for SR by researchers who have investigated the perception of "subconscious" visual sensation.

So it seems all the more likely to me that some QM random noise gets to manifest an effect at the macroscopic level of human actions.